Re #2
His hand flexed at my waist. “You need to choose for you,” he said. “Your want. Your consent. Your timing.”
A line drawn around the only thing that mattered.
Me.
“And the bite?” I asked.
“If you choose him, he bites you with me and the council present.”
My pulse kicked hard.
“You bite him back when you choose to. Not because law requires balance. Because you want the claim returned.”
I watched him. “That matters to you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
His answer came without hesitation. “Because I know what it felt like when you bit me,” he said. “And he deserves that.”
My body went hot. My hand tightened in his shirt. “Dominic.”
“Yes.”
“I want him.”
His hand tightened at my waist. Enough to tell me the words had landed exactly where he had no armor. “I know.”
“I’m not ready to complicate things more tonight.”
“No.” His answer was immediate. Certain. A boundary.
“But I’m moving toward him,” I said.
Dominic didn’t look away. The pain was still there, banked under discipline and a generosity I hadn’t expected from any dragon, much less mine.
“Yes.”
“And toward both of you.”
“Then we plan for both.”
It was the most Dominic response possible. Romance, but make it operational. I let out a breath that was almost a laugh and shook my head. At him. At me. At the council, at Norway, at the fact that my love life now required legal strategy, witness coordination, and possibly airspace awareness.
Then I kissed him and for half a second, he let me lead it. Then the heat between us widened. The discipline he had been using to hold himself at the edge finally ran out of room.
He closed the space, and the kiss stopped being conversation. His hand slid from my jaw into my hair. The other settled at my back. He pulled me against him until no air was left between us. His mouth moved from mine to my throat. To his claim.
The moment his lips touched it, heat flooded up from the mark without warning. Pleasure snapped through my hips. My hand fisted in the front of his shirt. My breath broke against the curve of his collarbone. The sound that left me didn’t feel entirely civilized.
Dominic didn’t move his mouth. He held there, lips pressed to the mark, everything in me ringing against him. He read every degree of what happened to me through the exact place his teeth had set into my skin three weeks ago.
Then his teeth grazed the mark. Lightly. What his mouth had already done came back doubled. The pull came harder this time, and pleasure broke again, bright and entirely unconcerned with my dignity. I pressed my forehead into his shoulder and made no effort to swallow the sound that left me.
“Dominic.”
“Yes.”
I lifted my head enough to look at him. “What do you need?”
His pupils were vertical and full of heat when he raised his head.
“You.”
Simple.
Rougher than I expected.
My breath caught. “You have me.”
His mouth opened like he meant to say it again.
I didn’t let him.
I put two fingers against his lips, and his breath stopped under my touch.
“Sit down.”
He didn’t move.
“Dominic. Sit.”
This time, he did. He lowered himself into the chair behind him. The one Rhain had used.
I stepped between his knees and unbuttoned his shirt one button at a time. The fabric opened under my hands, slowly enough that I felt the bond react to every inch of skin I uncovered. When the bite at his collarbone came into view, clean and dark against him, something possessive rose in me.
My claim on him.
Dominic’s breath was no longer steady. His skin ran hot under my fingertips everywhere I touched him, answering before either of us could pretend this was measured.
I knelt.
His hand came to my jaw at once. Careful. Asking nothing. Just holding for one second, as if he needed the shape of my face in his palm before he let himself be undone.
“Catalina.”
“You said you need me.”
“Yes.”
“Then let me do this.”
His fingers flexed once against my cheek. Then he let go.
I undid his belt, then the fly, then the fabric that had been keeping him contained. He was already hard. He had been hard since the corridor, I suspected. He had walked through the entire conversation with that as a baseline. Council law. Emergency recalls. Second bonds. Political containment.
Dominic Graves, suffering through all of it with excellent posture.
His breath broke when I took him into my hand. The sound he made was rough and broken and entirely new to me. I leaned in and took him into my mouth. Dominic went still.
The first stroke was slow, and the second was slower because I felt exactly what it did to him. Through the bond, through his body, through the hand that closed hard over the arm of the chair.
He said my name. Quiet. Ragged at the edge. His hand came to the back of my head. He didn’t push. He didn’t direct. He only held there, fingers careful in my hair, as if touching me was the only thing keeping him inside himself.
I took him deeper. Pulled back. Took him again. His control shuddered.
And because I could feel the line he was holding, I did it again, slower this time, until his breath left him in pieces and heat climbed under my ribs hard enough to make my own pulse stumble.
The bond ran both ways. What he felt hit me as a hot pulse under my ribs.
What I did to him reached back through his hand at my neck, the bite at my throat, every place we had become less separate than we should’ve been.
His pleasure didn’t stay his. Mine didn’t stay mine.
The bond took the difference between giving and taking and made it irrelevant.
His thigh went tight under my forearm. His breath shortened. “Little spy.”
I didn’t stop.
“Catalina, I am going to come.”
I hummed a small, pleased sound around him. The sound drove him over. He came in my mouth with a sound older than English, his hand fisted at the base of my skull, his other hand white-knuckled on the arm of the chair.
The bond reverberated with him. His release hit it hard enough that the echo broke through my own body, bright and violent. It ran through the mark and down my spine, and then I was coming with my hands braced on his thighs.
No touch where I needed it. No warning. No permission. Not even the courtesy of pretending I was in charge. The bond had carried him into me, or me into him. I wasn’t in a position to diagram the new physics. I was, however, going to need the vocabulary quickly.
I lifted my head and wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist.
Dominic watched the movement like it had marked him. “Little spy.”
“Yes.”
“Stand up.”
I stood.
His eyes came back up to mine. Every place I had touched him. Every place he hadn’t touched me yet. The attention made my pulse misbehave.
“Take the rest of it off.”
I obeyed. The dress first. Then the rest.
His chest moved unevenly. His eyes had gone dragon.
He was hard again. Dragon physiology. Both marks still ringing. Three weeks of discipline finally snapping its leash and turning to hunger.